Keith
Hart in februari on Empire (see an earlier prfr3 collection from his site)
------------- metafilterians on Pim Fortuyn ------------- metafilterians
on 'in gold we trust by Dibbel ------------- 172982 UN
backs Palestinian resistance UN Backs Palestinian Violence Arab, European
nations pass resolution supporting use of 'armed struggle'
------------- 172800 Dutch Government Falls Over Srebrenica Massacre via
reuters ------------- ://coyote.kein.org/pipermail/
generation_online/2002-February/author.html the next to months had only
a tenth of the traffic, no doubt due to the absence of fat posts poster
Keith Hart; here are some samples: ------------------ From HART_KEITH@compuserve.com
Tue, 5 Feb 2002 05:29:05 -0500 Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 05:29:05 -0500 From:
Keith Hart HART_KEITH@compuserve.com Subject: [Generation_online] a close
reading My suggestion was addressed to an exchange between Thomas and Arianna
of 28-29th January. Thomas wrote: Well, it seems to me that our attempts
to create a discussion around the topics originally drawn up is not working
very well. There have been a few informational emails recently but I dont
think we have had an actual discussion since well before Christmas. As
we had quite lively debates during the original reading of Empire, I suppose
that the present conceptual format is too loose and that if we want to
continue on with this experiment we should probably choose a particular
book to read and discuss (this would give structure), or we can pick out
sections from Empire to reread and discuss. I certainly hope that we can
continue on with the experiment, changing the format to a more suitable
one, as we have in the past had so many fruitful exchanges. I would like
to hear the opinions of others on this matter. To which Arianna replied:
Yes I agree completely that we ought to get back to sections of Empire.
The conceptual approach was aimed at enriching a rereading of empire with
other relevant works, but it was ambitious :-) so we could go through the
sections of Empire and whoever has time/inclination to read something around
them can use the reading list or bring in more stuff. Reading Empire a
second time has a rather different effect I suppose I personally read much
more into it than I first had done. I would propose that we decide where
to start independently of the order of chapters, for instance I'd say from
part 3, which seems to engage more with a description of the present rather
than of how we arrived to it. This is obviously just a suggestion and hopefully
others will make their own and speak up. But if people are not up for it
I think we can still keep the list active in other ways. I agree with Arianna's
suggestion in every detail and suggested one way of going about it. One
plan that has been floated several times and sank is the idea that we might
read some specific texts complementary to the book Empire. It does seem
preferable to leave open what other materials, literary and historical,
people might want to bering to another reading of the book and Part 3 is
a good place to start. Rather than just write in saying "Me too!"), I confused
matters by commenting on the exchange between Geert and Clifford. Now I
must respond to the questions brought up by Thomas and Erik, but, in the
interest of speeding up the programmatic aspect, I will be brief. The issue
of totality and dialectic is about the most abstract philosophical point
I made and perhaps it does deserve careful consideration, especially with
reference to Hardt and Negri's own writing on the subject.. I have to say
that the intellectual tradition from Spinoza to Negri via Deleuze is not
as familiar to me as the line from Kant to Hegel to Marx to Lenin to my
mentor, CLR James (who wrote a book called Notes on Dialectics). When I
speak of dialectic, I mean that strand and not much of 20th centry writing
that sometimes also uses the word. I have learned a lot from the Frankfurt
School, but am not all sympathetic to Adorno and the gang. Hegel, in his
Science of Logic, is concerened with the relationship between ideas and
reality (I would say, life). We may have a word 'house' and be able to
say 'my house', but if we leave it at that and hope that things will stay
the same, we will be embarrassed to discover that the actual house deteroriates.
An idea is something that helps us to organize experience. It always leaves
out what the idea is not. Sometimes what it is not can be organized as
a paired negation and that negation moves dialectically. Eventually the
ideas become confused and lose their force (negative dialectic). This can
pave the way for the emergence of a new idea (positive dialectic). It is
within this sort of framework that I would approach the claims made by
H & N for Empire. In the Introduction to Grundrisse (The method of
political economy), Marx lays out his own version of the dialectic. he
says we must always start from the concrete moment of history as we encounter
it. Then we develop some analytical abstractions after it (the commodity,
capital etc). Then, and this is the vital part, we insert these abstractions
into the concrete. He claims, falsely in my view, that Hegel and his followers
were happy to remain at the abstract level, with th eidea and not a reality
tgransformed by the insertion of ideas. In any case, that is his dialectical
method. He outlines a programme concluding in the attempt to grasp world
economic history as a whole, but he never got that far. How do we insert
abstractions into the concrete or test ideas against reality? By a variety
of intellectual and political procedures -- laboratory experiments, writing
projects, debate, propaganda, revolutionary action. This is where I would
start from. A totalizing narrative is for me one which seeks to encompass
a whole abstractly, without a method for inserting it into historical reality.
I do not accuse H & N of that practice, but I suspect them of it. That
is why I would like to engage in a critical reading of their work with
others. Thomas also asked me to elaborate on why I think that Empire misses
out on the important developments of the 90s, such as the communications
revolution. I have written a book (Money in an Unequal World, 2001) which
emphasises this aspect in my take on contemporary world history. I will
be glad, when the time comes, to discuss what they have to say about this
phenomenon, but soi far I have not come across mcuh. Just look up communications,
internet, digital, virtual etc in the index. The short section, Beyond
Measure (the Virtual), pp 356-59, is highly abstract and asserts, "By the
virtual we understand the set of powers to act (being, loving, transforming,
creating) that reside in the multitude." There is no specific reference
to virtual reality. This is what I mean by what appears to be a deliberate
distancing from contemporary social reality, a willingness to rest content
with totalizing abstraction. Keith -------------- Nate is asking about
the empirical status of Empire and Erik reasonably offered an anology with
Marx's treatment of labour and abstract value or capital. It is an interesting
question why Marx, in rejecting idealism, went not for empiricism, but
materialism, which some would say is another form of idealism. These are
powerful metaphysical questions and we each answer them in diffrerent ways,
often without being conscious of it, if we are not trained philosophers.
Since the whole Empire idea rests on such issues, it would not be surprising
if our discussions were confused by the different metaphysical assumptions
we bring to them. The trick is to start at a more grounded level somehow.
But the question of the virtual and real, as revealed by digitalization,
rests on similar questions, as does whether what we are expereincing now
is something essentially new or simply an old story in drag. I want to
offer a couple of analogies using more familiar language, in th ehope of
showing that non-place has been with us for a while. The book and markets.
No doubt old Homer was great act in a smoke-filled barn on a Saturday night.
But when his oral poetry was committed to writing, it became the basis
for a fledgling Greek civilization and for much after that. Homer ceased
to be a physical person (maybe he was never that) and could be anywhere
and everywhere. Religions of the book caught on to the idea. You did not
even have to copy the stuff out. If you can get kids reciting the Koran
by heart under a tree, the same possibility for universal shared understanding
can be realised over a very large space. And Martin Luther knew there were
no limits to his revolution if he could get ordinary people reading the
Word in print. Similarly, markets used to be places where people handed
over physical things. But, to the extent that trade covered long distances,
people needed impersonal money to make contracts with people they might
not know personally. For 5,000 years states have been determining the objective
value of the real assets performing this function, long before they got
round to minting the stuff as coins. In the modern period, markets have
grown in volume and have taken an increasingly immaterial form. For example,
Japan is going through a huge economic crisis right now that could bring
down the rest of us, since it is the second biggest economy in the world.
They may choose to devalue the yen against the dollar, making their exports
cheaper, or they could just dump Toyotas at loss leader prices. The resulting
deflation has not been seen in the West since the 1930s. But the American
car workers will find their companies struggling to compete and will maybe
lose their jobs because Japanese deby is six times the GDP. Not long ago,
in 1998, midwestern farmers feared losing their pensions because of a crisis
involving Thailand, Russia and the world's largest hedge fund, Long Term
Capital Management. if you ask to be shown where this stuff is actually
taking place, you have a problem. Hundreds of billions of dollars disappear
into thin air. Is that good? Is it bad? Who knows? Does anyone know how
much went down the drain in the telecoms bust last year? If the consequences
are real or imaginary? Marx had the benefit of being in on the ground floor
of all this. He wanted to know how Manchester textile factories could put
the Begal weavers out of business. These are real people in real places,
but the way it happens is not immediately visible. So, as I said in a previous
post, he developed some abstractions to make sense of it: the exchange
value of commodities, money as abstract value, capital, socially necessary
labour time, surplus value, the rate of exploitation, the organic composition
of capital (aka mechanisation). But he would have considered himself a
failure if people spent their time reproducing his abstractions or the
words, in order to show that they were Marxists. That is why he said, I
am not a Marxist. But he did put a lot of his energy into writing a big,
difficult book that could become the Bible of the movement. So what are
we to think? Keith This is an impressively coherent section, at several
levels: in offering a theoretical explanation for how and why imperialism
became Empire; in providing a new and powerful periodization of the twentieth
century; and in situating the emergence of the informational economy within
the evolution of primitive accumulation. For me the most important contribution
was H & N's tracing the origins of the postwar period to the New Deal,
America's internal restructuring of the Depression years. The replacement
of European imperialism becomes the externalisation of that project through
the second world war and its aftermath. This in turn culminates in the
Vietnam war, making the 70s the watershed of a new phase of world economy
based on unification of the market. The Cold War is taken to be secondary
to the project of decolonization and formation of a genuine world market,
and if anything it diverted the US from its historic mission. Theories
of centre and periphery associated with Amin, Frank and others reflect
the failure of modernity in the 70s, but miss the main dynamic, the formation
of a world market in which transnational capital is unimpeded. A more abstract
periodization linking the origins of capitalism, its modern industrial
heyday and the postmodern information age points to the formation of a
global proletariat, the force that will arise to socialise the world market
brought into being in this way by capitalism, with the USA as its chief
instrument. There is a lot to talk about there, but, as I said, it is orginal
and impressive. I could emphasise what I found dissonant in this section.
For example, I do not recognize the phenomenon of Third World urbanization
without industrialization in a purple passage like "Peasants throughout
the world were uprooted from their fields and villages and thrown into
the burning forge of world production." Most of them were consuming food
from the world market and producing nothing for it in return. This relates
to the issue of whether informational capitalism integrates the world market
or pushes most people out of it. I am also unsure of the value of the section's
leading concept, 'disciplinary governability'. I would love to know how
the Reagan regime's support for racist states and terrorists in Africa
during the 80s fits into this oversimplified account. I can guess. But
I think the overall picture of the twentieth century given here and its
grounding in the theory of primitive accumulation deserves to be addressed
for itself, before we dispute whether it applies in detail to the world
as we know it. At the least, we have an approach which sees the two main
turning points, after the great imperialist world war, as the 30s and the
70s, with the present as its outcome. Moreover, the USA's role is both
taken to be central and a reason is given for why it would be mistaken
to think of it as imperialist in the old sense. Keith ------- I think we
should allow others to take up the text we are reading more directly. But
here are a few definitions to be going on with. H & N's take on the
virtual is pp. 356-61. "Virtual" means existing in the mind, but not in
fact. When combined with "reality", it means a product of the imagination
which is "as good as real", almost but not quite real. In technical terms,
"virtual reality" is a computer simulation which enables the effects of
operations to be shown in real time. The word "real" connotes something
genuine, authentic, serious. In philosophy it means existing objectively
in the world; in economics it is actual purchasing power; in law it is
fixed, landed property; in physics it is an image formed by the convergence
of light rays in space; and in mathematics, real numbers are, of course,
not imaginary ones. "Reality" is present, in terms of both time and space
("seeing is believing"), and its opposite is imagined connection at distance,
something as old as story-telling and books, but now given a new impetus
by the convergence of telephones, television and computers. Keith -------
Thanks to Matteo and Erik for referring us back to the source. I still
feel a bit guilty that the only message to address the passage we are supposed
to be reading together has gone without comment. There is an issue of language
politics, about whether we should use words in their agreed dictionary
sense (especially when for so many English is a second or third language)
or follow the usage developed by specialist thinkers. But I agree that
on this list we seek to discover the value of Negri's thinking or specifically
the sense of the book Empire. Beyond measure (the virtual) "...'beyond
measure' refers to the vitality of the productive context, the expression
of labour as desire, and its capacities to constitute the biopolitical
fabric of Empire from below. Beyond measure refers to *the new place in
the non-place*, the place that is defined by the productive acitivity that
is autonomous from any external regime of measure. Beyond measure refers
to a *virtuality* that invests the entire biopolitical fabric of globalization.
By the virtual we understand the set of powers to act (being, loving, transforming,
creating) that reside in the munltitude. We ahve already seen how the multitude's
virtual set of powers is contructed by struggles and consolidated in desire.
Now we have to investigate how the virtual can put pressure on the borders
of the possible and thus touch on the real. The passage from the virtual
through the possible to the real is the fundamental act of creation. (Note
a). Living labor is what constructs the passageway from the virtual to
the real; it is the vehicle of possibility. Labor that has broken open
the cages of economic, social and political discipline and surpassed every
reugulative dimension of modern capitalism along with its state-form now
appears as general social activity. (Note b)" (p. 357). Note a refers to
Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy? and especially to Deleuze Bergsonism.
Bergson (and Deleuze) affirms the virtual-actual couple over the possible-real,
since it captures the unforeseeable novelty of the act of creation. H &
N beg to differ in that they insist on the creative powers of virtuality,
but also insist on th ereality of what is being created. Note b considers
the relevance of Marx on abstraction (in Grundrisse) to this question of
virtuality and possibility. They suggest two versions. The abstraction
of capital separates us from our powers to act and "is therefore the negation
of the virtual". But also abstraction on the side of labour is "the general
set of our powers to act, the virtual itself." "The power to act is constituted
by labor, intelligence, passion and affect in one common place. This notion
of labor as the common power to act stands in a contemporaneous, coextensive,
and dynamic relationship to the construction of community." (p. 358). "This
ontological apparatus beyond measure is an *expansive power*, a power of
freedom, ontological construction, and omnilateral dissemination....Whereas
the definitions of the power to act in terms of the singular and the common
are Spinozist, this last definiton is really a Nietzschean conception.
The omnilateral expansiveness of the power to act demonstrates the ontological
basis of transvaluation, that is, its capacity not only to destroy the
values that descend from the transcendental realm of measure but also to
create new values." (p. 359) In the face of this, one has to ask whether
the authors are more interested in communicating their ideas or in covering
themselves against all attempts to penetrate them. Don't you love "omnilateral
dissemination" for "spread the word around"? Just when you have been ploughing
through their own sentences, you are told to take a course in Spinoza.
Just when you thought it was a good guess that they were following Deleuze,
you get the opposite in a footnote. The weird thing is that I think I may
have been posing similar questions to theirs when I tried to find out what
people really do in their economic lives, as opposed to what is imposed
on them by capitalism and state bureaucracy. I called it the informal economy
and I used a straight Kantian (or neoKantian) dialectic of form and its
negation as my conceptual basis. I also struggled with Hegel's Science
of Logic to find ways of thinking about the movement from the actual to
the possible or vice versa. This pair was one excluded from their in-house
dispute with Deleuze (and Bergson). I suspect that H & N have mistaken
Deleuze and assimilated the virtual to the ideal. But this text alone is
an inadequate as basis for such a judgement. What is clear, however, is
that their notion of the virtual has nothing whatsoever to do with the
digital revolution oc communications in our day. And it is remarkable that
the authors of a book published in 2000 should feel able to discount popular
usage in this respect. It even misleads casual readers into imagining that
they are addressing the world we confront in our daily life. I would not
have taken the trouble to copy out these texts, if my only aim were to
dismiss them. I hope that someone on this list will elucidate them without
simply displacing the argument to some other text or author. Keith ----------
From HART_KEITH@compuserve.com Mon, 4 Feb 2002 04:10:59 -0500 Date: Mon,
4 Feb 2002 04:10:59 -0500 From: Keith Hart HART_KEITH@compuserve.com Subject:
[Generation_online] for Geert and a close reading There is the question
of giving preference to interpreting books over trying to make sense of
contemporary history. This has extended recently to the suggestion that
we consider Lenin's Imperialism, which is fine as long as it goes with
a historical understanding of the period in which it was written. A tendency
to abstract the Hart and Negri text from current events suggests that that
might not be so. Similarly the discussion of the shift from Capital Vol
1 to Vol 3 which carries with it the danger of scholasticism, an obsession
with dead texts at the expense of historical context. As a teacher I see
the value of reading specific texts as a way of giving conceptual form
to substantive arguments. Which is why, as I said, I would welcome a disciplined
reading of Empire as a textual basis for discussing world history today.
Whatever my views on its intellectual merits, the book is a social phenomenon
of our times and deserves close attention. I am less interested in the
ongoing performances of Hardt and Negri as contemporary stars of the international
chat circuit. Even less in hagiographical citation of the book as canonical
text. The relationship of the USA to 'Empire' is at the core of it. Some
might say that, despite the pluralistic optimism of the 'multitude' concept,
H & N have produced a totalizing idea which, like any other such, fails
to grasp human realities in a dialectical way. This is reinforced by its
relentlessly philosophising style and their obvious failure to come explicitly
to terms with the main developments of the post-1989 period, such as the
communications revolution, never mind events since the book was written.
Relations of alliance and division within the imperial power (singular?),
between America and Europe (with Britiain hovering), between states and
capitalist corporations, not to mention the emerging global role of China
and India, Japan's crisis etc -- all this commands our analytical attention
at least as much as the book itself. The problem is that we each bring
very different historical repertoires to the task and that too may be a
good reason for concentrating on what H & N say in detail. At least
we can agree that the print on page n is the same for all of us, as long
as that does not become an excuse for never referring to anything outside
the text and its canonical forebears. The opening section of part 3, 'The
limits of imperialism', pp.221-239, concludes a negative summary of Arrighi's
The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (1994)
with the following: "More important than any historical debate about the
crisis of the 1970s, however, are the possibilities of rupture today. We
have to recognize where in the transnational networks of production, the
circuits of the world market, and the global structures of capitalist rule
there is the potential for rupture and the motor for a future that is not
simply doomed to repeat the past cycles of capitalism." Leading up to this
comment on cycles we have a brief account of the intellectual history of
theories of imperialism, mainly Marxist, but offering a chance to revisit
Marx, Luxemburg, Hobson, Lenin and so on. We are at liberty to dispute
the adequacy of these theories in their own time or their relevance to
ours; to assess H & N's brief account of them; to consider the merits.if
any, of Arrighi's position; to consider the theory of history that they
allude to here; or to ask what it would take to recognize the potential
for rupture now or at any time. This last might go so far as to inspect
the language of the quote, especially its use of the possibilistic tense
and hence of dialectic. Keith -------------- From ksnelson@subjectivity.com
Sun, 10 Feb 2002 13:53:56 -0800 Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 13:53:56 -0800 From:
Kermit Snelson ksnelson@subjectivity.com Subject: [Generation_online] non-place
Keith's point about the non-novelty of non-place is excellent, as are the
"grounded" analogies he uses to illustrate it. But since he seems to be
fearful about treading on metaphysical ice, I'll take it upon myself to
rush right in. :) Over the years, philosophy has got into trouble because
of the tendency of human nature to aestheticize one aspect of reality over
another. Form over force, mind over matter, accident over substance, substructure
over superstructure, ontology over epistemology, subject over object, time
over space, etc. Or the other way around. And N&H are now claiming
that because of the digitization of technology, the virtual is privileged
over the real and that everything is different now. Well, human nature
certainly hasn't changed, has it? I'm reminded of the dispute between Goethe
and Newton over the nature of color. Since Newton won, we all know what
his theory is: color is the wavelength of light. But Goethe said that couldn't
possibly be, that color was part of the eye. Press your finger gently against
your eyeball for a moment, he wrote, and let go. Do this in total darkness,
and keep your eyes closed. You'll see a bright patch of color that then
fades, through all the colors of the spectrum, in order. (He's right; I
tried it.) Obviously, the spectrum is in the eye. It is subjective. Therefore,
nature is subjective. Goethe considered his theory of colors to be the
main achievement of his life. Beethoven shared this assessment of Goethe's
work. Goethe was a great man, but the rejection of his theory (according
to his Boswell, Eckermann) led him to an all-too-human bitterness. Plato
thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous
golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What
a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare
a bird. (William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children") What I'm saying
is arguments like N&H's (and even Goethe's) are scarecrows. Form and
force, subject and object, virtual and real, etc. are inseparable. They
depend on each other, and none can ever be more important than the other.
Do scientists get excited about rainbows? They're as real as anything else,
but they're also in a non-place. They're "virtual". Goethe and Newton were
both right, so why fight? As Keith pointed out in his post, books are also
virtual. And I think I also detected in his post a hint that books become
dangerous when aestheticized over the real. Indeed, do we really want to
embrace the idea that reality is prior to, created by, language? In my
view, the key passage in _Empire_, the one that epitomizes the argument
of the entire book, is the following: The real revolutionary practice refers
to the level of _production_. Truth will not make us free, but taking control
of the production of truth will. Mobility and hybridity are not liberatory,
but taking control of the production of mobility and stasis, purities and
mixtures is. The real truth commissions of Empire will be constituent assemblies
of the multitude, social factories for the production of truth. [p.156]
Production of TRUTH? By commissions and factories? Do we really want to
accept Negri and Hardt's "correction" of Jesus Christ (John 8:32) and his
consequent transformation into Orwell's Big Brother? Such are the dangers
of "virtual" politics. Kermit Snelson ---------- metafilter.com/comments.mefi/16355
April 15, 2002 Anti-immigration candidate Pim Fortuyn forges ahead in the
Netherlands This guy is interesting - he's openly gay yet is the figurehead
of the new right in the Netherlands. His party came out of nowhere in Rotterdam
to take 17 seats and he has ambitions to be Prime Minister. His policy
is to halt immigration into the most densely packed country in Europe,
while retaining the nation's permissive and multicultural character.